Haunts

This story follows multiple hauntings at different locations all tied together by a horrifying secret. I wanted to write an original take on the origins of ghosts and hauntings and don't believe anything like my story has been written before.

Submitted: October 09, 2016

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Submitted: October 09, 2016

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7 Misty Meadow

East Lockwood, MA

2006

Mike woke with a start. A cursory glance at the bedside alarm clock told him it was 3:45. Mike usually slept the whole night through, but tonight he was up. 'Could something have woken me?' he
wondered. Mike needed to piss, but that had never been something to drag him out of bed at odd hours.

His wife, Jill, was still sleeping soundly, her mouth ajar and drool spilling onto the pillow. Mike found this oddly adorable. He loved his wife more than anything, now more than ever. Six months
ago, Jill had broken the news to him that she was pregnant. They had been trying for over a year and were beginning to worry they couldn't have one and were considering going to a doctor. But now,
the third trimester was here and their marriage had never been happier.

Slowly, so he wouldn't wake his wife (who was sleeping for two), he crept out of bed. 'Once I piss, I can go back to sleep,' he thought. 'This better not become a recurring thing for me at night.'

Mike and Jill had been living in their home for 5 years now, so Mike had no need to turn on any hall lights to navigate himself to the toilet. The bathroom was the first door on the right down the
hall from his bedroom. Mike didn't even bother closing the bathroom door behind him or flipping on the interior light, but he could vaguely make out the outline of the toilet from the glowing light
of a charging hair dryer on the sink.

'I'm having a baby!' Mike reflected happily as he stood before the toilet, preparing to relieve himself.

In the quiet of night, the sound of piss hitting water seemed to roar out, shattering the serenity like a rude neighbor starting a lawnmower at the crack of dawn on a Sunday. It felt like the sound
of wind rushing past his head on a roller coaster.

From the hallway outside the bathroom, Mike heard footsteps.

He ceased urinating in an instant, uncomfortable as doing so was. The hair stood up on the back of his neck.

The footsteps had not come from the bedroom towards the bathroom, but from the opposite end of the hallway. Someone was coming towards him and his wife, who he had left unprotected in the next
room.

The sounds of urination ceased. The sound of footsteps did not.

Step.

Step.

Step.

'Could Jill have gone in the kitchen without me noticing and is on her way back?' thought Mike. 'No, it's impossible, there was no time. There's an intruder in my home! They must have made some
noise that woke me up. And I mistook it for needing to piss like an idiot!'

Step.

Step.

Step.

The owner of the footsteps was right outside the bathroom door, which was wide open. Mike stared into the darkness, trying to see who was there. He could see the door frame illuminated, yet the
hallway was pitch black. Literally anything could be standing on the dark side of that open expanse. Mike had never been afraid of the dark, but now the darkness seemed to be an almost palpable
thing, its weight bearing down on him, sneering unseen from within the abyss.

'Being a father means protecting your child,' thought Mike, tucking his dick back into his pajamas. 'You absolutely can NOT let that freak reach our bedroom.'

Mike charged the darkness. He flipped the light switch as he ran full barrel, intending to direct his momentum towards his intruder the moment he had a visual on the fucker.

The suddenly illuminated hallway was empty. Unable to cease his assault, Mike ran face first into the wall. His nose broke instantly, leaving a small, bloody splat against the paint, looking like
the smear of a well-fed mosquito after one crushes it against their arm, only on a larger scale. Mike recoiled from the wall and fell on his ass, his head ringing.

“Mike? Mike, are you okay?” came his wife's voice from their bedroom.

“I-I'm fine,” he called. 'Just a moron, apparently,' he thought to himself. 'Did I really just imagine all that? What is wrong with me?'

Jill emerged from the bedroom, turning its lights on as she approached. “What on Earth just happened, honey?” she asked her bloodied husband.

“I, uh, tripped. Guess I was still half asleep,” Mike said.

“Jesus, is your nose broken?” she asked.

“Feels like it,” he said. “I doubt I'm getting back to sleep at this point. I should head to the hospital, hopefully they can get me fixed up quick enough where I'm not too late for work.”

Mike was getting back on his feet when the two of them heard it. A voice was coming from their bedroom.

“Mom?” it said.

Mike and Jill locked eyes.

“Mom?” it came again, sounding afraid this time.

Jill and Mike were paralyzed, too scared to move. There was a beat of silence.

'I just imagined it,' Jill thought.

“MOMMY, WAKE UP!” it screamed.

Mike and Jill burst into their bedroom. They were not alone within it. Standing at the side of their bed was a child. He looked between 8 and 10 years of age. He looked right at them.

“Someone help my mom!” he screamed.

Jill turned to run, no rational thought in her mind dictating why or where she would go, just wanting to be away. The floor rug that was beneath her feet slid against the wooden floor as she
abruptly turned to flee. The rug slid and Jill fell to the ground, landing directly on her 7 month along pregnant belly.

Jill's scream of pain cut through Mike's soul like a blade. Every implication of that moment crushed his brain. He knew his child had just died. He knew his wife's health could equally suffer. He
knew most marriages don't survive things like this. He knew his life as he knew it was over.

Mike was at his wife's side as she sobbed. “Wait right here, I'm calling 911,” he told her.

He stood and began to address the intruder. “Look here kid, I don't know what kind of game you're playing, but...” Mike's lecture trailed off. There was no child in the room. The only door out of
the bedroom had been behind himself and Jill, there was no way the kid could have fled without them noticing. Yet, in spite of such logic, he was gone.

236 Wintergreen Way

East Lockwood, MA

2009

“Daddy, wake up.”

Frank Guthrie woke with a start. His daughter, Margaret (Maggie for short), was standing before him in the dark, shaking him. He saw from the beside clock that it was 2 in the morning.

“Daddy, please!” she begged, and Frank realized Maggie was crying, sobbing even. That got his attention and he was immediately wide awake.

“What is it, sweetie?” he asked. Frank hugged his daughter and found she was shaking in fear.

“He's in my room again, Daddy,” Maggie whispered.

Frank sighed. “Oh honey, this again?” he asked.

“Please let me sleep in here with you guys. I can't go back in there. He's so scary!” she begged.

“Maggie baby, you know these things you see are just your imagination or bad dreams. You can't keep sleeping in here with us every time you get scared,” Frank lectured.

Frank hadn't been taking any of this seriously, but that final line sent shivers up his back. Once, when they had visited the city, the family had made the mistake of walking in the park in the
evening. His daughter had pointed off in the distance and said “That guy is doing something weird.” Frank had looked in that direction and saw a homeless man masturbating beneath a tree. Frank now
got a chilling image of his daughter waking in her room to find the image of that homeless man sitting across the room from her, smiling a drunken grin and slamming his salmon.

It hit Frank in this moment that his daughter probably needed a therapist. Recurring nightmares of people in your room weren't normal.

As Frank carried her into her bedroom, he began to say “See, nobody here but...” and his sentence died in his mouth.

There was a man standing in the center of his daughter's bedroom. He appeared to be between 18 and 20 years old. His hair was long and his eyes were wild. He was holding a crack pipe.

Frank screamed like a girl. He completely forgot he was carrying his daughter and he dropped her to the floor. Her wail of pain mixed with Frank's pitiful shriek into a cacophony of sound.

“Hey man, want a hit?” asked the intruder, extending his hand to offer Frank the pipe.

Frank grabbed his daughter and dragged her from the room. Once in the hallway, he turned back to the room only to find it empty. Frank looked in the closet, under the bed, and even outside the
windows, but the man was nowhere to be seen.

Frank looked Maggie dead in the eye. “Listen to me Mags, this is very important, you need to tell me the truth.” She nodded in acknowledgment. “All those times you told us someone was in your room,
was it always him?”

“Always,” she whispered. “Sometimes he does different things. Sometimes he doesn't seem to notice me, other times he asks me questions.”

“Jesus Christ,” moaned Frank.

The Guthrie family moved the very next day. They told the Realtor that the house was haunted. The Realtor neglected to mention that to the next homeowners. After all, she knew the history of the
home. Nobody had ever died here. Of course it wasn't haunted.

Shop & Save

East Lockwood, MA

2011

Eddie Callahan loved working on the graveyard shift at the local Shop & Save. He got to work alone. He got to choose his own music. He could smoke weed and drink booze on occasion with no
consequence. For someone who didn't finish high school, it was the cushiest gig one could get. Everything in Eddie Callahan's work life was exactly as he wanted. That is, until the night he met the
Phantom Janitor.

Everyone had heard the rumors of the Phantom Janitor, especially the night crew guys. Eddie was tempted to blow it off as some kind of myth, or maybe a prank to haze the new employees. But even his
shift manager, Rob Malloy, claimed to have seen the ghost, and Rob Malloy did not seem like the joking type.

“Don't be scared if you do see him,” Rob had warned Eddie. “The dude is harmless. He shows up every once in a while, wheeling around one of those dorky janitor trolleys.”

“Who was he before he... you know, croaked?” Eddie asked.

“Nobody knows. You'd think that if a janitor had died in the store, people would know about it. But he's definitely a ghost, not a prowler. I've pulled security footage after personally seeing him
and the cameras only showed me standing there like a dumbstruck idiot. So he must have died here,” Rob said.

On the night Eddie met the rumored entity, he had just finished smoking a joint outside. He loved smoking some weed and then rocking out to his tunes while stocking the stores shelves. Eddie was in
the zone, bouncing to the tunes on his headphones, when he turned the corner to walk down aisle 3 and saw a figure at the opposite end of the path.

Eddie was in need of glasses that he currently couldn't afford, so he found himself squinting, trying to see who was down there walking towards him. 'Is that Rob? And what is that cart he's
pushing?' Eddie wondered.

When Eddie had walked close enough for the man to come into focus, his blood ran cold. It was a janitor. Shop & Save had no overnight janitors. But here was this man, wearing the store uniform,
pushing his trolley full of cleaning supplies towards him.

Eddie wanted to turn and run, but Rob's words echoed in his head about how harmless the Phantom Janitor was. The janitor was looking down at his cart as he walked. Soon, they were going to pass
right by each other. Eddie felt weak in the knees and had to will himself not to collapse as they got within an arms length of each other.

Suddenly, the Phantom Janitor's head snapped up and he locked eyes with Eddie. Every hair stood up on end under the cold gaze of the man. Eddie was close enough to read the man's name-tag even. It
read 'Steven'. He didn't look like a ghost, just a regular teenage kid.

“Be careful up ahead,” said Steven. I just mopped there. It's slippery.”

“Uh, thanks man,” said Eddie.

'I just talked to a fucking ghost!' screamed alarm bells in his head.

They passed each other. Steven kept looking ahead with his trolley, but Eddie couldn't stop staring at the spook. Eddie was walking backwards now, staring slack-jawed at the ghost.

Suddenly, Eddie's feet lost their previously firm grip on the floor. It felt like he was walking on slick ice. Eddie had time to think 'Did that guy actually mop this floor?' before his skull
cracked against the marble tile. Blood poured from a contusion in his head, puddling up along a 'Caution: Wet Floor' sign that had been appropriately placed in the center of the aisle.

Eddie would wake up, but he was bordering on a vegetable state on most days. On the few days where he could form sentences, nobody would believe his tale about how the Phantom Janitor had an actual
name: Steven.

236 Wintergreen Way

East Lockwood, MA

2013

Racked with fever, Jacob tossed and turned in bed. He had already missed 3 days of school and was on track to miss at least 3 more before recovering. The small tidbits of sleep he did achieve were
interrupted by fever dreams of the oddest order. Dreams where he was in his own room, but everything had faces: the chairs leered, the wardrobe frowned, and the ceiling fan laughed hysterically at
his ailment.

Sometime after 2 in the morning, Jacob dragged himself out of bed. He had always been a sound sleeper, and his parents joked that a hand grenade couldn't wake him on a normal day. He had been
drinking so much cold medicine that he could barely even tell if he was actually awake or just dreaming this. He felt like he was floating as he drifted into the bathroom to relieve himself. He had
never really walked around his house in the night like this before and everything seemed to take on new forms.

After that, he worked his way slowly through the dark house towards the kitchen to grab a cold Gatorade. In the kitchen, he was directly beneath his bedroom. As Jacob stood in the doorway of the
open refrigerator, enjoying the cool air against his clammy forehead, he heard the sound of footsteps coming from above him.

'Someone is in my room,' Jacob realized. 'Mom probably heard me moving around and came to check on me.'

He drank a couple small sips of the sports drink and then worked his way back to his room, moving slowly to avoid waking the rest of his family. His mom might be kind enough to check on him, but
his dad would be furious if stirred. Jacob got to his room and closed the door in just the right manner to avoid it uttering it's trademark rusty squeak.

Jacob never bothered turning on any lights. He went right to his bed, put the Gatorade on the bedside table, and curled up under the blanket.

A voice in the room spoke up. “Hey, kid.”

Jacob was on his feet before he could mentally realize he was being startled to stand. He pulled the chain on the lamp beside his bed, exposing the perpetrator of his terror. A man stood before
Jacob. The man appeared to be either an old teen or a young grown-up. He was holding a glass pipe.

“You want to smoke some?” the man asked.

Jacob was about to scream. He stood frozen to the spot. Then, instead of crying out for help, he burst out in a giggling fit. “Oh man, I drank too much Nyquil!” Jacob laughed.

“Nyquil? Righteous. I like tripping on cold medicine, too,” said the man.

“Yeah, you look like you would,” Jacob told the dream-man. After all, this was obviously a dream, just like the one where the ceiling fan was mocking him.

The dream man just stared at him with his bloodshot eyes. His hand was still extended, offering the crack pipe. “You look sick, little dude. Try this. It's like medicine,” he said. “By the way,
what's your name?”

“I'm Jacob. Who are you? Not that it matters, seeing as you aren't real, but I should call you something,” explained the child.

As Jacob inhaled crack-cocaine for the first and only time of his life, the euphoria hit him right away. “Hell yes, this is medicine all right!' thought a giddy Jacob as he exhaled a massive plume.
He then fell into a coughing fit. Jacob coughed for 5 seconds, then seemingly froze as if something had startled him. Then he collapsed to the floor.

When his mother found him in the morning, Jacob was long dead. The coroner declared his death a drug overdose, having found high traces of crack-cocaine in his system, yet the police never found
any drugs on the property and the parents passed drug tests that they took voluntarily. Everyone was stumped as to where the drugs came from and how Jacob had hidden them. Jacob's parents did not
get divorced over this, but they never had another child. Nobody ever slept in Jacob's room again.

7 Misty Meadow

East Lockwood, MA

2015

It had been nine years since Mike's life virtually ended. The same way that ghost (because it had been a ghost, it MUST have been) had vanished without a trace, his unborn child had done the same.
Next, his wife was gone, left to live with her mother. Within a month of her leaving, there was no trace that she had ever existed within Mike's home. No stranger walking in would pick up the
slightest indication that Mike had been married beforehand.

The way things were, until they weren't, was a great source of stress on Mike's weakened mental state. 'Treat nothing as real or it will disappear,' was almost his mantra. He feared to get attached
to anything, as if his attention could trigger its departure.

Mike never dated again post-divorce. He drank every night, usually rum (straight). Where most men would have moved away from the home that held such miserable memories, Mike adamantly refused, as
if taking the homes horrible aura as a personal challenge against him, one he planned to meet head on.

'It was a ghost. That fucking ghost ruined my life. I lived here for 5 years before it showed itself. It's like the fucker was waiting patiently, biding its time, for the perfect moment to strike
and make me lose it all. Now it hasn't shown its face in almost a decade. But when it does, I'll be ready. I don't care if it's a kid or not, he crossed the wrong man. I'm going to kill that little
shit.' Mike's thoughts were almost always in a perpetual cycle of different variations of those themes, played on a loop. He was a man obsessed.

Over the years, Mike had done his research. A child named Corey Smith had died in this house almost 50 years ago from leukemia. Mike had been able to track down his obituary at the public library.
It had a picture with it, which didn't look exactly like what Mike remembered the kid looking like, but he must have just remembered it wrong. 'Who else could the ghost be besides this kid? Nobody,
that's who. That cancer ridden little bastard murdered my child. Now I'm going to murder him.'

Mike was not exaggerating when he declared his intentions to kill the spirit. He had done his research and learned that the common consensus for killing a ghost was to burn its bones. He also
learned that salt was the only thing that could touch them in their naturally non-corporeal state and would even burn them.

One foggy night 5 years back, Mike crawled his Volvo into a local graveyard. It was 11 pm and his headlights were off the whole way. He had been there in the daytime previously to get the lay of
the land. Now, under cover of dark, he retrieved a shovel from his trunk. It took him most of the night, but he got little Corey Smith's bones unearthed and packed up.

He could have just gone home and burned the bones then and there, but he waited. Mike knew that the ghostly bastard was bound to show himself again someday. And when he did, Mike would look him in
the eyes as he burned. Mike didn't know if ghost could suffer, but he hoped they could. He wanted to hear the little bastard scream the way his wife had. Mike wanted to pour salt on him and watch
him melt like a slug into a mess of gore.

Visions of the son of a bitch howling as his skin dripped from his face danced in Mike's head during the days as he worked. He had been a banker in his married life, but after the divorce, he
became abrasive and would pick fights with co-workers. He was drinking before going in to work and one day snapped and called his boss a cunt. He walked out before she could say “You're fired” and
never even went back for his last paycheck. Now he worked on a small landscaping crew where he could mostly keep to himself and no customer service skills were required.

It was 1 in the morning on a Friday night. Mike was up late getting shitfaced. He was in the kitchen nursing a bottle.

SLAM!

Mike was on his feet, jumping right into action mode. 'That was a door! Someone slammed a door! It's Corey!'

“I'm coming, you piece of shit!” Mike hollered as he ran to his room. He noticed the bathroom door was closed while his bedroom door was open. The bathroom must have been the door that was slammed.
No windows were open so there was no chance of a draft that could have done it. Mike burst into his bedroom and ran to his bed. He reached under it and pulled out a duffel bag. Within it was a can
of kerosene, a zippo lighter, a vat of salt, and a burlap sack. Within the burlap sack was Corey's skeletal remains.

“Who you gonna call...” muttered Mike under his breath as he rose with his ghost busting gear in tow.

First he checked the bathroom but found it empty. 'Where is this bastard?' wondered Mike as he proceeded to systematically check the entire house. He looked in every nook of the basement, the
bathroom two more times, ran through the kitchen a few times, inspected the room that would have been his kids bedroom but now was just storage, and his own bedroom.

The house was empty.

Mike began to cry. Years of unhappiness welled up at once, spurred on by his hopes being dashed after being raised so high. 'Did I even hear that slam? Have I finally lost it?' he wondered.

Mike stumbled into the kitchen, picked up a half-empty pint of rum, and downed it all in one chug. He hurled the bottle at the wall, excited to hear the glass shatter, yet instead it just dully
thunked the wall and fell to the ground undamaged.

“FUUUUUCK!” roared Mike. He ran at the wall and punched it, longing to feel his fist crush a hand sized hole in the plaster. Instead, the wall held up fine. Mike had punched against a stud and
instead of breaking the wall, he broke two of his knuckles.

Mike roared a wordless agony, giving no thoughts to if his neighbors could hear him. They all knew he was a drunk and a recluse and they kept their distance. If they could hear him, they would
dismiss it sadly rather than poke their nose in where it didn't belong.

Mike drunkenly stumbled to his bedroom to return his ghost bag to its spot under the bed and to nurse his wounds. As he entered the room, he froze.

The child was standing beside his bed.

“You!” yelled Mike.

“Me?” asked the ghost.

“You're fucking dead!” Mike bellowed. He whipped the salt from his duffel and threw a handful of the condiment in the specter's face. “Hahaha! Die, bitch!” Mike yelled in mindless triumph. Yet the
ghost didn't seem to be effected in the slightest by the salt.

“No,” said Mike, defeated. “You can't be. Nobody named Steven ever died here.” But even now, Mike could see that the boy looked exactly as he did those 9 years ago and he was definitely not the kid
from the obituary photo.

“Huh? I'm not dead,” said Steven. “You're weird. I'm leaving.”

“Wait!” yelled Mike, but Steven was already gone.

Mike's mind broke. He even heard the sound of it tearing, like the noise of peeling velcro apart. He collapsed and began to giggle idiotically.

“His name is Steven. Hee hee hee. No, he's lying. Corey is lying. Hee hee hee ha ha. The internet was just wrong about killing ghosts. There is no way to kill a ghost. At least... not while I'm
still on the mortal plane...”

In the kitchen, Mike located the largest butchers knife he could find. “Up and down, not right to left,” he muttered to himself as he prepared to do the deed. He would kill that Corey fucker yet.
Maybe a human couldn't kill a ghost, but Mike was willing to bet that, once he joined the little shit in the afterlife on equal footing, he would be more than strong enough to murder this son of a
bitch. Then maybe he would take over as the resident ghost and haunt the next tenants who came after him.

Mike didn't pussyfoot around with tiny surface wounds. Mike dug the knife a full inch into the meat of his upper wrist, then raked the knife down the length of his arm, tearing free all muscles and
tendons that tried to impede it's path.

“Here I come, you son of a bitch!”

Mike thought he yelled those words, but his dying sentence was actually no more than a whisper.

Lockwood Asylum

East Lockwood, MA

2015

Steven woke to his familiar room in Lockwood Asylum, the place he had lived for almost a decade now. He felt uneasy after a weird recurring dream he had just woken from. Steven had both good and
bad weeks. He slept in restraints during the bad weeks, but this week he had some semblance of sanity and, hence, more freedoms.

Steven could barely remember his bad spells, but was assured that he spent them trying to climb up the walls, often in a padded room. In the good weeks, he could still have hallucinations, but he
had gotten good at knowing the difference between reality and delusion.

Steven hadn't always been crazy. It happened in 2005 when he was 24 years old. His car had been struck by a drunk driver while he was driving home from work one night. Initially, they told him he
was lucky to escape with only a concussion. Little did they know that the blow to his head had shaken everything irreparably loose.

His mind was already in a fragile state from a misspent youth abusing drugs. He had a bad crack habit and also smoked meth a bunch after dropping out of high school. When he turned 20, Steven
finally went to rehab, passed a high school equivalency exam, and enrolled in college. At 24, he had an amazing girlfriend and a promising legal career ahead of him. At 25, he was unraveled. He
hadn't quit drugs early enough and his brain had enough damage where a concussion was the straw to break the camels back.

During his weeks of lucidity, Steven would have the most vivid dreams. Always he was revisiting haunts from his past. His dreams always reminded him of that Kurt Vonnegut line, about how Billy
Pilgrim had become unstuck in time.

Often, he was back in the crack house he had crashed at for a year in his drug days. His dreams brought the house back to him in vivid realism. The house had been in a nice neighborhood and the
homeowner was a fellow addict who was defaulting on his mortgage and riding out his time before the bank kicked him out. Their source of income was an insurance fraud scheme the man had concocted.
He always found himself back in the room he stayed in while living there, usually smoking crack in the dream. Even his dream highs felt realistic and he often woke craving more of the addictive
substance.

Many nights, Steven dreamed he was back working his high school job at the Shop & Save. He worked there for 4 years as a janitor and doubted more than 2 co-workers even knew his name and
realized he existed.

Sometimes he would be in his childhood home of 7 Misty Meadow. In these dreams, he was always the age he was when he lived there, 10. At that age, he had discovered his mother, dead of a heroin
overdose, lying lifeless in her bed. That night plagued him in his dreams. He had just woken from a dream of that house this morning. This dream was far weirder than the usual ones. In it, some fat
old man was attacking him, throwing sand in his face and setting things on fire randomly. 'What a weird dude,' reflected Steven. 'Hopefully I don't see him in my dreams again.'